GLAZEBROOK

A cursory look at a kooky old chook, and others in her crazy henhouse

The Honourable Dame Susan Gwynfa Mary Glazebrook is one of New Zealand’s most powerful and corrosive people. Glazebrook is an arch activist judge on New Zealand’s highest court, our Supreme Court. She’s even got to stand in as New Zealand’s Governor-General when Governor-General Dame Cindy Kiro, in a rare burst of devotion to duty, attended the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in Britain.

Like a disproportionate number of New Zealand’s invasive pests, Glazebrook was born in England. She’s never been much of a practicing lawyer - more of a complicated legal storyteller and fantasist. She’s the mad old aunt who adores nothing more than holding court amongst her gullible minority of devoted extended family, while most ignore her solipsistic and slightly sinister presence. But as a collective we can’t afford to ignore her and her fellow traveller judges.

Glazebrook was Damed in 2014, along with the ubiquitous Patsy Reddy (the ex-Governor General who has wrecked everything in business leadership that she’s ever touched, most recently the governance of New Zealand Rugby) and Lowell Goddard (the ex-High Court Judge who quit as the head of the British inquiry into child sex abuse, when it dawned on her that she may have to do some work).

Private Citizen McLean

Sometimes I’d love to walk in the shoes of Shane Jones, the wildly articulate NZ First MP who’s currently Minister for Oceans and Fisheries, Regional Development, and Resources. But in matters of assessing New Zealand’s Judiciary, I’d rather be me, because Ministers are technically not allowed to criticise The Rarified Judges of Aotearoa. Attorney General Judith Collins has recently issued a ritualistic reprimand of Jones for calling High Court judge Cheryl Gwyn a “communist”, a Justified Jones Jab that I’ve covered in one of my recent Substacks:

This friction between the Judiciary, in one corner, and the incumbent Government and Parliament, in the other, is asymmetric – The Rarified Judges are working feverishly to undermine the current Government and usurp Parliamentary sovereignty, but Government Ministers and Parliamentarians are formally prohibited from criticizing this judicial overreach and the perpetrating judges. The Judiciary pleads the prophylactic cloak of constitutional “comity”, while grasping for unaccountable constitutional supremacy.

As a common citizen however, I’m free to say whatever non-defamatory things I damn well like about Glazebrook, who many - me included - regard as a menace to democratic New Zealand society.

Glazebrook’s Looney Lecture

Glazebrook drinks deep of the Kaumatua Kool-Aid and worships fanatically at the altar of Mystical Māori Marvelousness. (Nowadays, in her deluded dotage brain, she’s probably a Born-again Māori.)

The effort of which Glazebrook appears most proud is a lecture she gave at Auckland University on 26 September 2019. Her lecture was at the invitation of the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law, some sort of metastasized tumor in the guts of Auckland Uni. The lecture, clunkily entitled “The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Courts”, was reproduced verbatim in a 2020 edition of Te Tai Haruru Journal of Māori and Indigenous Issues, a “Things Māori” publication put out by…Auckland Uni. The journal has nurtured, as editors, such legal luminaries as Khylee Quince, Aotearoa’s Queen of Legal Pedagogical Quackery, and legal academic Claire Charters.

The Quince & Charters Show

Quince is the bitter, fragile, smoky-eyed strangling who, as imposter head of the law faculty at Auckland University of Technology (can that outfit truly be a uni?), “posted” of lawyer Garry Judd KC:

I suppose it was inevitable that one of the old racist dinosaurs would make a pathetic squeal in an attempt to preserve the status quo….

Mr Judd and his “mātauranga Māori is not science” friends can go die quietly in the corner…

Claire Charters is the smiling assassin in the phalanx of Aotearoan Race Warriors. She is a prime example of the odd rule that the thinner the Māori lineage, the more radical the Māori Magicalness (…another such specimen, the Māori Party’s Debbie Packer). Charters’ father’s mother apparently had some Maori ancestry, but that’s the extent of it. It’s tantamount to claiming that a dog which is 15/16^th Huntaway, and 1/16^th Black Labrador, is fundamentally a Black Lab. It’s all bonkers gaslighting. Race Division is Unity is possibly New Zealand’s starkest Orwellian Doublespeak.

Proud (Susan Gwynfa) Mary

Glazebrook, cut from the same cloth as Quince and Charters, is so enduringly and profoundly proud of her lecture that she regularly updates its Te Tai Haruru Journal version to reflect her evolving genius in the phantom field of indigenous jurisprudence. Her most recent update was on 17 June 2024. The layperson, uninitiated in Weird Ways of Critical Race Theory (and Wokery), could be tempted to conclude that the notion of a written record of a verbal lecture being able to be continually updated is flawed…if not entirely bananas. But not to Glazebrook and her ilk. For them, everything is up for revision and reinvention...feelings trump facts; history is…history.

The subject matter of Glazebrook’s lecture (and make no mistake, all us common folk are being sternly lectured) was the implications for Aotearoa (the country that was New Zealand) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That’s the pontificating and otherworldly UN Declaration that Sir John Key, as Prime Minister, signed New Zealand up to in his infantile attempt to be cool and get down with the brown kids. The Declaration led directly to He Puapua, the 2019 Manifesto to turn New Zealand into Woke Broke Ethno-State Aotearoa by 2040. Chairwoman of the “Declaration Working Group” that produced the He Puapua Manifesto is Claire Charters.  

The choicer morsels of Glazebrook’s lecture, in its current incarnation, are reproduced at the end of this Substack. Readers can chew on, and endeavour to swallow and digest (without choking), the titbits that I think best evidence Glazebrook’s startling judicial activism and dystopian ambition for separate race-based New Zealand nations.

And Granny Glazebrook is not wailing from the wilderness. Hers is no academic pursuit. She’s living her best life and bringing death defying delusions to the Court room.

Glazebrook led the 2022 Supreme Court siege on New Zealand rule of law, using dead man Peter Ellis as its Trojan horse.

In its decision to exonerate (quite rightly) the obviously innocent Ellis, Glazebrook and her seditious co-conspirators Helen Winkelmann and Joe Williams gratuitously injected tikanga (Māori folklore) into New Zealand’s legal landscape.

With none of the lawyers who appeared before the Supreme Court invoking tikanga voodoo, Glazebrook implored Peter Ellis' team to advance tikanga - despite Ellis being profoundly Pākehā. The next day the Supreme Court sent a minute to those lawyers directing them to cover what tikanga was relevant and should be taken into account.

Glazebrook slyly did this knowing full well that the Government had asked the Law Commission to methodically investigate what if any role tikanga should play in New Zealand’s common law. In contriving to inject tikanga, Glazebrook therefore deliberately and wantonly pre-empted and stymied our Government’s sovereign right to conduct that investigation, and our Parliament’s prerogative to act on its outcome.

In the Ellis case, a majority of the Supreme Court judges, Glazebrook, Helen Winkelmann and Joe Williams, unilaterally (and without needing to, in order to exonerate Ellis) elevated the place of tikanga in New Zealand’s common law. Previously, since 1908, the test for incorporating tikanga in New Zealand’s common law was that the tikanga had to be a general custom of Māori, not contrary to Parliamentary statute law, and reasonable.

The activist majority in the Ellis case denounced that test as a "colonial relic".

The Ellis decision means that New Zealand’s courts can now apply tikanga in any case and in any way they see fit, without the case even having to involve Māori issues, and gazumping common law and Parliament legislation. It’s all a recipe for toxic judicial and societal uncertainty, without informed public debate and consent. I’ve covered a more recent tikanga case in an earlier Substack:

Subversive Tactics

The tactics of the combatants embedded in our unelected Judiciary, Waitangi Tribunal, Maoridom Academia and Public “Service” - in their crusade to Raceify New Zealand - are disarmingly simple. In their fanatical endeavours to steer New Zealanders on a journey to Aotearoan Ethno-Statehood, they each fabricate increasingly radical and revisionist narratives and other anti-democratic nonsense, and then incessantly quote and defer to each other as authoritative in their arcane, invented and nonsensical world…

Glazebrook references Quince and Charters, Charters and Quince blow smoke up the arse of current Supreme Court Judge Joe Williams, from his days on the Waitangi Tribunal…etc. etc. …bla bla bla. All with a gullible Woke Main Stream Media incessantly quoting the noises emanating from this Ethno-Centric Echo Chamber. It’s a Turangawaewae Tag Team!

But it’s a flimsy house of cards, lacking the glue of rationality, reason and popular support – or let’s hope so.

Glazebrook’s Gobbledygook Lecture

Those mouthfuls of muck I mentioned…

…It [the lecture] then examines the Declaration in the domestic New Zealand context, concluding that it is becoming increasingly embedded in Aotearoa’s legal framework.

…But the Declaration is not just about rights, whether individual or collective. It is also about redress for past wrongs. Perhaps most importantly, however, it is about the significance of being indigenous. It is about cultural and spiritual identity. And, it is about self-determination generally. At the same time, it is about the value of diversity. So all in all it is a very special document.

…Secondly, there is a possibility that the Declaration is already or may become customary international law and therefore binding on all states, whether they voted in favour of it or not.

Starting with the environmental treaties, I include these because of the special relationship indigenous peoples have to their environment and the link between the environment and their cultural and spiritual identity. Stewardship of the environment is a quintessentially indigenous value, as is the care for and duty to future generations…in New York in September 2019 it was recognised that indigenous peoples knowledge is essential to curbing the effects of climate change…What these examples have in common is the growing recognition of the collective nature of indigenous rights and the importance of the protection of indigenous rights not only for indigenous peoples but for the world more generally.

…Indeed, Associate Professor Claire Charters has suggested that the current international human rights framework is a manifestation of ongoing colonial domination that does not respect indigenous philosophical or legal traditions.

…I do not intend to make any further comment on self-determination, other than to say that consideration of Associate Professor Charters’s third category of indigenous rights will be vital in any analysis of state obligations to provide self-determination for indigenous peoples within those states.

Intersection of Indigeneity and Other Groups

…Another issue that will arise with regard to the Declaration relates to the intersection of indigeneity and other groups, and in particular other minority groups.

…I note the issue of the adverse effect of colonisation on traditional authority structures, particularly as they relate to women. Commentators suggest that colonisation and the associated Western gender hierarchy norms changed the balance between men and women in indigenous and other pre-colonial societies. This has deprived women of their traditional authority. These issues are to be aired in New Zealand before the Waitangi Tribunal next year in the mana wāhine kaupapa inquiry.

…I now move onto the significance of the Declaration for New Zealand. I start by acknowledging the long-lasting effect of colonisation on New Zealand’s indigenous people.

…I would suggest that the fact that the Declaration is not a treaty is in fact somewhat irrelevant in the New Zealand context.

…It is not too much of a stretch to presume that Parliament also intended to legislate in a manner consistent with a declaration, like this one, that was passed by the UN General Assembly by such a large majority and that the executive took a positive decision in 2010 to endorse and a further decision this year to develop an implementation plan for. I would suggest, therefore, that the courts may well treat the Declaration in the same way as unincorporated treaties.⁷¹ This is especially the case where, as I discuss later, the Declaration in fact elaborates on rights already enshrined in the Treaty.

…even when not enshrined in legislation, te Tiriti is likely to be used by the courts in a similar way to unincorporated treaties. This means it will be presumed that Parliament does not intend to act in a manner that is contrary to the Treaty, even if the Treaty is not mentioned in the particular statute. Statutes would be interpreted in accordance with that presumption if possible. Further, any broad discretions given to the executive under legislation would be presumed to be intended to be exercised consistently with te Tiriti. Like unincorporated international law treaties, te Tiriti can also be used in the development of the common law.

I mention here for completeness that, aside from this, tikanga should in any event have been regarded as part of the common law, provided it was not inconsistent with a statute and met certain tests, which I suggested in Takamore v Clarke would need to be modified to reflect modern thinking on indigenous issues. Tikanga has not, however, been seen until recently as part of the common law, and the legal system has remained resolutely based on the British system forced on Maori in the colonial period.

^…What is important for our purposes is that New Zealand’s endorsement of the Declaration means it has further committed to honouring te Tiriti.

…Article 5 goes further and reflects a kind of balance between rangatiratanga and kāwanatanga — that indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining the right to participate fully in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the state.

…But the Declaration is much more detailed than the Treaty and in this sense provides elaboration of the Treaty rights and obligations.

…The third type of case is where the Declaration is relied on to interpret a statute. I venture to suggest this will be most successful where this submission is combined with reference to the Treaty and particularly where the Treaty is referred to in the legislation. This would enable the Declaration to be used to flesh out the obligations in the Treaty in some of the ways I have just discussed. And this could have quite a significant effect on adding more legal weight to both the Treaty and the Declaration.

The fourth type of case is where the Declaration is used to argue that executive discretions and policies should be aligned with the Declaration. Assuming there is nothing in a statute that prevents this, arguments such as these could be successful in the same way that arguments based on unincorporated treaties can succeed. The more the Declaration is referred to by the executive as being a cornerstone of indigenous policies, the more likely it is that such arguments could be successful.

The final type of case is where the Declaration is one of the sources used to argue for the development of the common law. This is probably one of the most promising ways the Declaration could be used. But any development of the common law will have to accord with the common law method, which favours incremental change. The most promising aspect of this could be the incorporation of tikanga into the law of New Zealand. This is because, as I said earlier, custom should in fact be part of the common law already.

…What is clear from how the Declaration has been used so far in our courts and tribunals is that the more parties cite the Declaration and the more the Crown has to respond to the submissions, the more the Declaration will become embedded into New Zealand’s legal framework. The work the government is doing on the plan to integrate the Declaration into its indigenous policies across all of government can only accelerate this trend.